Finding the Lost Mother Tongue

Recently,while completing his Hindi holiday homework,my eight-year-old son rued to me,“If I’d been born British I wouldn’t have to learn Hindi. It’s so difficult.” Sounds familiar? It did to me. And it’s a reality that most urban parents are hugely intimidated or downright frightened by their primary school children’s Hindi text books. Many under-10s I know have Hindi tutors and I should get one too,but I’m resisting only because I feel acutely embarrassed about it.

All my childhood and most of my adult life,I have struggled with Hindi. Growing up in Bombay,my foundations were non-existent. To add to my woes,I had to learn Marathi,the memory of which still makes me shudder. When I moved to Delhi in middle school,Marathi was cruelly replaced by Sanskrit,and the Hindi was about 10 times harder. Research says that children under five can absorb four languages simultaneously,but not everyone is born with the gift to be multilingual. Somehow,I scraped through and in Class 11 bid a cheerful adieu to all Indian languages for what I thought was,forever. But life has a way of throwing up strange opportunities and at the start of a career in journalism,I found myself at a Hindi news channel,surrounded by PhDs in Hindi.

I was beaten. I would seriously have to learn Hindi,if,for nothing else,just to keep my job. For the first year I kept conversation with my colleagues to a bare minimum in the hope they wouldn’t catch on,how pathetic my Hindi actually was. But journalists are nothing if not perceptive: word spread fast. The script editors used to dodge me to avoid being saddled with my inexplicable copy. In the early days,I reversed Roman: I wrote English scripts in Devanagari. Finally,I subscribed to Jansatta and forced myself to read it every morning. While I’m never going to be a scholar,I can now hold my own in a conversation,my vocabulary is decent,and I even enjoyed short stories by Prem Chand that I bought while obsessing over my Hindi.

The biggest mistake we make,is we stop talking in our languages at home,among family. Mrs Indira Gandhi had a rule with her sons,English outside,Hindi at home. Amitabh Bachchan has gone on record to say that he wishes his son spoke more,and better Hindi. So many of Bollywood’s top stars can barely string a sentence together. Top politicians,especially among the young MP’s,speak appalling Hindi,as do news anchors on English channels,who are often left stumbling for words during live telecasts. Hindi is in peril like never before,especially among school children growing up now. The link between English and prosperity has become so deeply ingrained post the call centre revolution,the youth all over India can’t wait to shed their regional backgrounds and be part of what’s considered the only medium of upwardly mobile,civil discourse: English. And we are a nation of sweeping contradictions. We watch Hindi movies. Nothing,absolutely nothing,rocks a party like Hindi music. We abuse in Hindi (seen Delhi Belly?) but we like to talk only in English. The rashtrabhasha,and other languages of our forefathers deserve a little space too.

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